This assignment is for ETC5521 Assignment 1 by Team brolga comprising of Sen Wang, Mayunk Bharadwaj, Dilinie Seimon, and Diyao Chen.

1 Introduction and motivation

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a life simulation video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. It was released worldwide on the 20th of March 2020. Since its inception, the game has had an astounding worldwide reception with over twenty-two million copies of the game being sold in just five months.

In the Animal Crossing world, a player takes the role of a customized human character who moves to a deserted island and carries out various activities such as gathering and crafting items, fishing and bug hunting in a village inhabited by various species of animals. Each of these animals called ‘villagers’ in the Animal Crossing world have their own name, gender, birthday, personality, favourite song and their own catchphrase. The items used in performing different tasks in the Animal Crossing world belong to different categories and are also priced at different buying and selling values.

The game also simulates day and night based on a 24-hour clock, and has different animals and insects appearing at specific times of day or night. The level of detail in the design of the Animal Crossing world has attracted many users playing throughout the day.

Although it has been only five months since the game was released worldwide, it has gained a lot of attention from both players and critics. Even non-players may find the concept of this game well-designed and interesting.

The motivation for choosing Animal Crossing for the analysis is to attempt to understand the reason for the immense popularity of the game using user and critic reviews and features within the game (such as the villagers and the items).

Therefore, the analysis of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons game is subdivided into two broad areas and answers the following sub-questions.

An analysis of the villagers and items used in the Animal Crossing world

What are players and critics saying about Animal Crossing?

2 Data description

The data set used for this analysis was retrieved from TidyTuesday; a project aimed at allowing individuals to practice their data wrangling and visualization skills through the use of real-world data sets.

The retrieved data set consisted of four sub-data sets; ‘villagers’ and ‘items’ data sets containing data about in-game characters and items, and ‘user reviews’ and ‘critic reviews’ data sets containing data about user and critics reviews on the game.

The ‘villagers’ and ‘items’ data sets have been originally retrieved from VillagerDB, which is a project aimed at making data about Animal Crossing available and easily accessible, while the user and critic reviews have been originally retrieved by scraping the Metacritic website.

3 Data Exploration and Wrangling

3.1 Handling Missing Values

It’s interesting how the buying value (buy_value) of 22.21% of the items are missing. In order to analyse this further, the percentages of missing buying values of each item category was calculated.

Figure 3.1: Percentage of missing buying values in each category of items

Figure 3.1 shows that all buying values of fish, fossils and seashells are missing.

Further research claimed that fish, fossils and seashells can not be bought, which explains the missing buying values. A blog on Animal Crossing states that fish can only be acquired by fishing and can not be bought (“Animal Crossing: New Horizons Fish Guide: How, When and Where to Catch All the Fish” n.d.). Further, a fan page on Animal Crossing states that fossils can only be dug up and seashells can be collected (“Animal Crossing Wiki” n.d.). The rest of the missing buying values too were attributed to be due to the inability to purchase the items in the Animal Crossing World.

The columns with over 80% missing values were dropped from the analysis due to the inability to impute values accurately. This did not impact the analysis due to the independence of each of the dropped variables from the rest.

3.2 Currency conversion

The buying and selling values of items in the animal crossing world were expressed in two currencies; Bells and Miles. For simplification of the analysis all buying and selling prices were converted into Bells.

The Nintendo guides states that a Bell Voucher can be bought for 500 Nook Miles, which can thereafter be exchanged for 3000 Bells in the Animal Crossing world . Therefore it was assumed that each Mile equated to 6 Miles in the currency conversion.

4 Analysis and findings

4.1 An analysis of the villagers in the Animal Crossing World

Non-player characters (NPC) play an important role in most games, to guide the player through the game and give the player a better virtual experience. In the Animal Crossing world, the non-player characters are called villagers and not only guide the player through the game but also live alongside the player in the game world.

The villagers in Animal Crossing are of different species and also have their own gender, birth date, personality, favorite song and unique catch phrase. The game is designed such that each villager is an independent individual keeping players attracted to the game for hours.

Figure 4.1 is a plot of the villagers in the Animal Crossing world belonging to each species and gender category.

Figure 4.1: The number of villagers belonging to each species

As visualized in Figure 4.1, there are 391 villagers belonging to 35 different species in the Animal Crossing world. Cats, rabbits, frogs and squirrels are among the most common species, while bulls, rhinos, cows and octopuses are relatively uncommon. Another interesting observation can be seen in the breakdown of each species by gender. Most species have villagers belonging to both male and female categories, but all bulls and lions are male while all cows are female. This maybe due to the terms ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ being gender specific; cows being the female counterpart of bulls. This however does not explain the non-existence of female lions in the Animal Crossing world.

The villagers in the Animal Crossing world belong to either of eight different personality types - male personality types (cranky, jock, lazy, smug) and female personality types (normal, peppy, snooty, uchi). It’s interesting how most villagers have normal or lazy personalities, while very few have smug or uchi personalities. The Uchi personality type which is also the rarest personality type, is described as sisterly, tough and caring about their appearance (“Animal Crossing Wiki” n.d.).

Figure 4.2: The different personallity types of each species

Figure 4.2 is a plot of the number of villagers belonging to each species broken down by their personality types. By the analysis, it is evident that the Animal Crossing world has a diverse set of villagers belonging to different species and genders and also having different personalities.

4.2 An analysis of the Items in the Animal Crossing World

The Animal Crossing world has many different items assisting the villagers in tasks such as building houses, fishing, bug-hunting, digging etc. Each of these items have their own characteristics and belong to one of the 21 categories.

Figure 4.3 visualizes the number of items belonging to each of the item categories. Most of the items in the Animal Crossing are furniture items, while there are also a lot of photos. The categories fruit and seashells contain the least number of items, while it’s interesting to see more types of umbrellas and socks than fruits. The Animal Crossing world seems very well equipped with item categories ranging from flooring to umbrellas.

Figure 4.3: Count of items belonging to each category

Figure 4.4 visualizes the median buying and selling prices of each item category.

Figure 4.4: Median Buying and Selling prices of Items in Animal Crossing

It’s interesting how the median selling price of each category is lower than the median buying price except for tools. The median buying prices of fish, fossils and seashells are not available as they are not available for sale in the animal crossing world. The difference between the median buying price and median selling price is proportional to the distance between the two points on each category.

Upon attempting to analyse the most profitable items based on resale, it was identified that no item in the Animal Crossing world generated a profit on resale. Furniture seems to have the highest median profit (or in this case, the lowest median loss).

The most expensive item available to buy is the Royal Crown which goes for 1200000 bells while the cheapest item to buy are photos at 40 bells!

4.3 What do the users say?

The analysis of user feedback on Animal Crossing uses 2999 reviews published by users on Metacritic from 2020-03-20 - 2020-05-03

Figure 4.5 is a plot of the trend of user reviews on Metacritic over time.

Figure 4.5: Trend of user reviews

The astounding reception of Animal Crossing: New Horizons since its world release on the 20th of March 2020 is justified by the number of daily user reviews it has received. Figure 4.5 shows a huge spike in the number of reviews on the 24th of March 2020, lasting till about the 26th of March 2020, which may be attributed to the world release of the game on the 20th of March 2020. The number of reviews there after remain consistent other than another smaller spike around the 28th of April 2020.

The user reviews also includes a score from 0-10, where 0 is the lowest and 10 is the highest. Figure 4.6 is a plot of the distribution of scores ranging from 0-10.

Figure 4.6: Distribution of user review scores on Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Most users score the game as a 0, while other users score the game as a 10. Almost all user scores are distributed to the two ends of the range of scores with very little reviews scoring the game a 5, 6 or 7. With the sudden hype about the game in the recent past, the low review scores seem questionable and may even thought of as the default score attached to a review if not explicitly stated.

The top 20 most common words in low and high grade reviews

Figure 4.7: The top 20 most common words in low and high grade reviews

According to Figure 4.7, there is a lot overlapping for the most common words.

Nonetheless, we can extract some information as to how high-grade reviewers feel about the game. These users in the comments use words like fun, love, amazing - all of which emote positive emotions.

Users who gave low-grade reviews use words like experience, person, one, progress, family and multiple. These are an interesting set of words that deserve further investigation. Upon reading full reviews, it was found that the game only allows ‘one’ island per Nintendo Switch which would means that if ‘multiple’ people in a ‘family’ were using the same device, they would not be able to start their own island. This seems to be the theme of most negative reviews of the game.

Continuing our analysis, a sentiment score between -5 and +5 are given to each user review, where -5 indicates a highly negative sentiment and +5 indicates a highly positive sentiment.

Table 4.1: Mean sentiments of each grade group
grade sentiment
10 1.1062425
9 1.0766219
8 0.7438356
7 0.7278481
6 0.3278351
5 0.4943343
4 0.2962963
3 0.1961722
2 0.0836177
1 0.0950000
0 -0.0851129

Table 4.1 shows the mean sentiment in the different group grade.

We can see very clearly the higher the mean sentiment of the user’s words is, the higher the user’s rating will be.

Figure 4.8 is a box plot summarizing the sentiment scores of all 2999 reviews from 2020-03-20 - 2020-05-03.

Summary of sentiments of user-reviews

Figure 4.8: Summary of sentiments of user-reviews

The box plot in figure 4.8 states that the overall sentiment of the user reviews to be just slightly positive at 0.4, which is surprising as it would’ve been expected to be much higher with the recent popularity it has gotten. Most of the sentiments of the reviews also lie within a range of -1 to +1, which may indicate to us that Animal crossing isn’t enjoyed by all and there are as many users dissatisfied by the game or disliking the game as those enjoying it.

4.4 What do the critics say?

In the analysis the viewpoint of critics on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons game, reviews published by 107 critics such as Forbes, Telegraph and Nintendo Life from 2020-03-16 - 2020-05-01 are used.

Figure 4.9: Trend of critic reviews

Figure 4.9 represents the trend in the number of critic reviews over time. Most critics have reviewed the game on the 16th of March, just before the world release of the game, while a smaller number of critics have made reviews in the days following that.

Since critics have the ability to influence people through their comments, it might be interesting to see the most used positive and negative words in their reviews.

The most used positive words by the critics

Figure 4.10: The most used positive words by the critics

The most used negative words by the critics

Figure 4.11: The most used negative words by the critics

Figure 4.10 shows the most used positive words in the critic reviews while figure 4.11 shows the most negative words. By direct observation of the number of terms in the two word clouds, the positivity seems to overpower the negativity in the critics reviews.

Figure 4.12 is a further breakdown of the words used by critics in their reviews, based on different emotions portrayed.

Figure 4.12: Break down of words used by critics into different emotional categories

As per figure 4.12, most words used in critics reviews are positive, and resonate the emotions of trust, anticipation and joy. A very few words used in reviews resonate the emotions of disgust, fear and anger, concluding an overall positive response from critics on the Animal Crossing game.

The scores given by the critics range from 0-100, 0 being the lowest and 100 being the highest. Figure 4.13 shows the distribution of these scores over critics reviews.

Figure 4.13: The distribution of critics scores on Animal Crossing- New Horizon

It’s interesting how a significant percentage of the reviews score the game above 90, while all of the scores are above 70. Comparing figure 4.6 and figure 4.13, all the critics seem impressed with the game while the users have mixed reviews.

4.5 How do reviews change over time?

We know based off our previous analysis, that Animal Crossing is something of a slow-burn as the game aims to simulate the pace of real life in certain ways. As such, this might affect the ability of reviewers (both critics and users) to fairly assess the game. For instance, how can users conceivably be able to review the game within the week of its release? How can one get a sound grasp of the functionality and the intrinsic rewards of the game without playing it for a few weeks at a minimum?

So, let’s group both user and critic reviews by week and calculate the average review and how it changes as the weeks pass.

Weekly average User and Critic Grades

Figure 4.14: Weekly average User and Critic Grades

Figure 4.14 shows us the Week (measured as the number of weeks since the start of year and the date of measurement) on the x-axis and the weekly average grade given by User of Critic on the y-axis.

The weekly average user grades starts at about 5.5 before beginning a decline in subsequent weeks and hovering at around 3-3.5 through week 16 before a significant jump in week 17 to 5.5 after which it once again drops.

The weekly average critic grades follow a moderately similar shape. The average critic grades are steady in the early 90s for the first couple of weeks before dipping below 90 in week 15. Interestingly, the average grade then experiences a sharp increase in week 17 - similar to what we saw in the weekly average user grades - before declining again.

So, overall the data does not suggest that there is a clear indication that users or critics’ feelings on the game improve or decline as they spend more time with the game. However, there are two things that ought to be explored from this point.

Firstly, we can see that the shape of the both weekly average critic and user grades are roughly similar. But how similar? The correlation coefficient of weekly average user grades and weekly average critic grades is 0.5684725 which indicates a weak-ish positive relationship between the two. It is not feasible, therefore, to suggest that there might be an influence of critic reviews on user reviews.

The second thing of interest is the dramatic spike seen in critic and user reviews in week 17. Did something happen in week 17 that led to a dramatic shift in the view of the game? Week 17 occurred from the the 22nd of April 2020 to the 28th of April 2020. A quick perusal of the full user reviews from this time period reveals that Nintendo released an ‘Earth Day’ update of the game. This evidently enriched the experience of game.

5 Conclusion

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a life-simulation game that challenges users to set up their ‘life’ on an island and interact with a villagers - who are of a diversity of species and personality types - and items - of which there are many at an an array of buying and selling prices.

User feedback of the game was mixed with positive user reviewers rejoicing in how ‘fun’ and ‘amazing’ the game is while negative user reviewers were disappointed in the game’s lack of multiplayer functionality. Critics were generally more effusive in their praise of their game with many describing the game as ‘perfect’ while negative critic reviews focused on the ‘slowness’ of the game. Critic and user reviewers were very weakly correlated but both displayed a spike in positive reviews after a game update in late April, 2020.

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